On the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Joy of Resistance presents: Why were women included in the Civil Rights Act–and how did they make it real?

Joy of Resistance: Multicultural Feminist Radio @ WBAI airs on the 1st & 3rd Wednesday of the month at 9-10 PM (EST) at WBAI, 99.5 FM (Tri-Sate area, East Coast, USA); streams at stream.wbai.org. Follow us on twitter at @joyofresistance. Archived for 90 days at archive.wbai.org To pledge support for WBAI: give2wbai.org

The category of “sex” almost didn’t make it into the Civil Rights Act of 1964–and its inclusion was thought of by many as a “fluke,” a “joke”–a way to derail the entire bill. Yet despite the lack of a women’s movement at the time, it prevailed and became a critical step in the birth of a new women’s movement.

On Wednesday, July 2, 9-10 PM, we will explore the complex history leading up to, and emerging from, the inclusion of women in the 1964 Civil Rights Act: not only the relatively uneventful Congressional vote that got “sex” included as a category of discrimination in Title Vll (which dealt with employment discrimination), but the decades-long back-story that was behind this landmark step for women.

We’ll interview activist-historian Jo Freeman, who will take us back to important women’s rights activism that took place between the winning of suffrage in 1920–and what was to become a new women’s movement in the 1960’s. We’ll explore how, after suffrage was won, the movement split into two camps: those favoring “protective” labor legislation and those wanting an Equal Rights Amendment (which would have made such legislation illegal).

Using Freeman’s article: “How “Sex” Got Into Title Vll” as a reference, we’ll trace how the National Woman’s Party (NWP), formerly a militant suffrage organization, lobbied relentlessly for passage of the ERA, while their opponents–centered on the successive Women’s Bureaus of a number of presidential administrations since the Roosevelt Administration–worked just as tirelessly to pre-empt any possibility of ERA passage. Freeman will also make a compelling argument against the popular myth that women were included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in order to derail it

Then we’ll look at what happened after women won this fragile foothold in Title Vll–only to be met with an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)–the agency created to enforce Title Vll–which ignored the 37% of complaints that were coming to them from women. We’ll speak with Sonia Pressman Fuentes, the first woman Attorney hired by the Office of the General Counsel of the EEOC, about the struggle within and without the agency that then ensued–and led to the founding of the National Organization for Women, which was created as an activist organization to pressure the EEOC to do its job, when it came to women!

We’ll also be playing clips from Jennifer Lee‘s powerful film: “Feminist Stories from Women’s Liberation” and in it we’ll hear voices of others who were part of these events, such as that of EEOC commissioner Aileen Hernandez, as well as Betty Friedan.

 

On Wednesday, March 5, @ 8-10 PM, Joy of Resistance is proud to present: “Feminist Stories from Women’s Liberation” a film by Jennifer Lee, with clips from the film and a discussion with the Director

WBAI can be heard at 99.5 FM in the tri state area. It streams at WBAI.org

 

As part of the WBAI Winter Fund Drive and to kick off Women’s History Month, Joy of Resistance 70) that we have yet come across: Jennifer Lee’s marvelous new film “Feminist Stories from Women’s Liberation.” Just out, and having already garnered two awards–the “Los Angeles Women’s International Film Festival: Best of Festival Documentary” and “Official Selection of the Cincinnati Film Festival”, this film has not yet been shown in theaters and, at present, is only available to the general public through WBAI.

 

In her introduction to the film, Lee shares with us that she was motivated to go on the quest that became the film, because she couldn’t figure out why the word “feminist,” when it came up among members of her generation, was whispered as if it were scary and somehow shameful. This led her to question why she didn’t know more stories from the feminist movement so that she could pass them on to those of later generations for whom this history was a blank. She decided to fly around the country and interview as many of the movement’s originators as she could find (“they are all around us”) and reclaim feminist history for her generation, by listening to “their stories”.    

 

Lee interviewed, among others, Betty Friedan (Friedan’s last video interview before she passed), Aileen Hernandez, the first head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Kathie Sarachild, a founder of Redstockings and a worker in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Frances Beal, founder of the SNCC Black Women’s Liberation Committee; and author of Triple Jeopardy; Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton–and many others.

 

Punctuated by an astonishing amount of period footage and an energetic sound-track, as well as wit and humor, the film begins with a glimpse of what life was like for women in the U.S. before the feminist movement (starting with women having been ousted from well paying factory/munitions jobs after WWll); the “happy housewife” propaganda of the 1950’s and Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book: The Feminine Mystique; John F. Kennedy’s 1963 President’s Council on the Status of Women; the influence of SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement; the fight  to get women included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964–and how it led to the founding of theNational Organization for Women (NOW); the Miss America Beauty Pageant Protest; the Ladies’ Home Journal sit-in and the Women’s Strike for Equality that included placing a banner saying WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE! on the Statue of Liberty. Many of the feminist goals raised in the film are still being fought for today, some 50 years later–such as full access to reproductive rights and universal childcare–and the film provides a useful underpinning for understanding our movements today.

 

A DVD of Feminist Stories from Women’s Liberation will be sent as a thank you gift to those who contribute $50. to WBAI.

 

WBAI IS A 54 YEAR OLD ALTERNATIVE, NON-COMMERCIAL RADIO STATION, PART OF THE PACIFICA NETWORK. We are in the midst of a critical fund drive and need your support to continue to bring you programs that are not dependent on–and therefore limited by–the dictates of corporate funding. SO PLEASE GIVE GENEROUSLY by going to give2wbai.org or calling (212) 209-2950.

 

If you call and contribute (any amount is welcome) during our fund drive show on March 5, your contribution will also count as a vote for the continuation and expansion of Joy of Resistance: Multicultural Feminist Radio @ WBAI. Thank you!

 

 

Wed., Jan. 15, 9-10 pm–Then and Now: New Hope for Childcare in New York City–plus: Reclaiming our Feminist History

Joy of Resistance airs on the 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month from 9-10 pm (EST) at 99.5 FM in the tri-state area & streams live at wbai.org. JOR tweets at @joyofresistance

We’ll start the show by touching on some of the major issues for women’s rights in 2013 and what we are facing in the new legislative session–as well as announcing events for the upcoming 41^st Anniversary of Roe v.Wade on January 22.

There is new hope in New York City for progress on a longstanding feminist demand—affordable and accessible childcare (including Pre-K and After-school programs) for all–now that we have a new Mayor who has pledged to prioritize this issue.

Our first interview will be with Neal Tepel, who was an organizer with DC 1707 (the Union of daycare workers) which led the fight against former Mayor Bloomberg‘s decimation of the city’s daycare system. Neal will help us assess the state of these critical facilities today, catch us up on recent history and try to see the shape of daycare’s immediate future in NYC. We’ll also play a portion of our 2010 interview with Professor Rosalyn Baxandall, who was part of the original feminist direct action movement that won for New York City a daycare system that was a model for the rest of the country.

In the 2nd half of the show, we’ll speak with Jennifer Lee, director and creator of the new film Feminist Stories from Women’s Liberation–which just  won the Los Angeles Women’s International Film Festival as “Best in the Festival for Documentary”–but which, more importantly, has the approval of many of the movement pioneers–approval difficult to come by, as this group was actually there  and has had to see its history distorted many times over.The documentary chronicles the story of the women’s liberation movement from 1963 to 1970. Beginning in 2005, Lee traveled the country interviewing many of the women who created modern feminism.

Lee introduces the film by telling her audience that she was motivated to go on this quest because she couldn’t figure out why the word “feminist”, when it came up in the conversations of her generation, was whispered, as if it were a scary and somehow shameful word. She felt that being a feminist was a good thing–but didn’t have the information whe needed in order to convince the whisperers of why she felt that way. She wondered why her feminist history had been so hidden from her and became determined to go in search of it.  

Lee interviewed, among others, Betty Friedan (Lee holds the rights to her last video interview before she passed), Aileen Hernandez (first head of the EEOC), Kathie Sarachild, (a member of Redstockings and a SNCC worker), Frances Beal (SNCC Women’s Liberation Committee and author of Triple Jeopardy), Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton–and many others. 

Punctuated by an astonishing amount of period footage and an energetic sound-track; the film touches on women in the U.S. before the feminist movement (starting with their having been ousted from well paying jobs after WWll); Betty Friedan‘s publication of the The Feminine Mystique; the President’s Council on the Status of Women; the struggles within the movement over lesbianism as well as class and race; the influence of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Civil Rights Movement; the fight to get women included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, leading to the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW); the Miss America Beauty Pageant Protest–and up to the Ladies Home Journal sit-in and the Women’s Strike for Equality. Many of the issues you see being raised in the film by are still being struggled for today–such as full access to reproductive rights and childcare–some 50 years later! Joy of Resistance hopes to offer DVD’s of this film as a premium during WBAI’s Winter Fund Drive in February.

Wed. 9-4-13, 9-10 PM, JOR presents: 1) Connecting the 1963 March on Washington’s exclusion of women speakers & the founding of N.O.W.; 2) Ultra Violet’s demo protesting Macy’s attack on equal pay: 3) Report-back from this summer’s Abortion Rights Freedom Ride

Follow JOR @ twitter.com/joyofresistance and listen on WBAI radio @ 99.5 FM Streams live @ http://www.wbai.org

Along with renewed attention to the 1963 Great Civil Rights March on Washington on its 50th Anniversary, on August 28, the spotlight has fallen on the fact that  women Civil Rights leaders were virtually absent from the speakers list– appearing only as singers or as non-speakers adorning the stage. Women such as Dorothy I. Height (President of the National Council of Negro Women), noted attorney Pauli Murray and Anna Arnold Hedgeman (the only woman on the “Executive Committee” organizing the program), fought fiercely with male leaders of the March for greater women’s representation–but were repeatedly given excuses such as “women are already represented because hey are members of organizations that will have (make) speakers”.

Less known is the story of how the frustration engendered by that experience, later became part of the mix that led to the the founding of the National Organization for Women, three years later in 1966.

On Wednesday, September 4, 2013, 9-10 PM, Joy of Resistance will present, as its featured segment, a discussion of this remarkable chain of events. Hosted by Fran Luck, guests will be noted SNCC activist Zoharah Simmons and former NOW-NJ President Maretta Short and will include readings from Dorothy Height’s essay “We wanted the Voice of Woman to Be Heard: Black Women and the 1963 March on Washington.”* in which Height describes what went on behind the scenes of the March, –and includes an excerpt from the Pauli Murray speech at The National Council of Negro Women, which made a great impression on Betty Friedan.

Macy’s involved in quashing Texas Equal Pay Bill–we’ll cover Ultra Violet’s demo at Herald Square:

We’ll also cover a demonstration that took place last Thursday in front of Macy’s department store at Herald Square, organized by the online activist group Ultra Violet. Feminists presented a Macy’s staff-person, with 90,000 petition signatures demanding that Macy’s apologize for helping to quash a state-level version of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in Texas. They also demanded that Macy’s pledge to fully support equal pay for women in the future. We’ll speak with Kat Barr, Chief of Staff for Ultra Violet about the the campaign, which started after it was revealed (in The Houston Chronicle) that Governor Rick Perry had vetoed the bill after receiving letters against the measure from the Texas Retailers Association–-including mega-retailers Macy’s and Kroger. The vetoed bill would have allowed victims of wage discrimination sue in state court–considered a much more convenient and affordable a procedure for working people, than suing in Federal Court. Forty-two states have passed similar state-level bills. There is also an ongoing online boycott of Macy’s, called by the group Progress Texas “until Macy’s supports equal pay for equal work.” Macy’s is considered particularly vulnerable to a women’s boycott, as the holiday season approaches.**

Interview with participants in Abortion Rights Freedom Ride

Our final segment will be an interview with participants in the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride, which started on July 24 and continued through much of August and traveled to key areas where access to abortion is under extreme assault, including Fargo, North Dakota; Wichita, Kansas and Jackson, Mississippi. Vans left from the east and west coasts, converged in Fargo and held protests, press conferences, public outings, and presented “Abortion providers are heroes!” awards to clinics and providers. The Ride, organized by Stop Patriarchy, is a response to the dire emergency posed by the worsening erosion of the right to abortion in this country. Joy of Resistance will speak live in-studio with Sunsara Taylor and some of the young activists who participated in the ride .

More on the Civil Rights March / NOW connection!

Depending on which testimony one consults, Betty Friedan has written, both in her 1983 introduction to “The Feminine Mystique” and in an interview she gave to Cynthia Fuchs Epstein in Dissent magazine (1999), that she was approached by Pauli Murray and Sonia Pressman Fuentes, both involved with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with the idea of starting an “NAACP for women” and that the idea of starting N.O.W. came from them and not from her. Friedan also says in “It Changed My Life” that she had heard of the rousing speech that Murray had given at The National Council of Negro Women, in which Murray had railed against the exclusion of women speakers at the 1963 March. Murray had said that women were not going to get anywhere unless they themselves marched on Washington. Friedan, herself had been reluctantly coming to the conclusion that Title 7, of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which had included discrimination based on gender, only as an afterthought–and as a possible attempt to derail the anti-racist legislation), would not be enforced as it applied to women, unless an organization was formed that would mobilize “public pressure”. The National Organization for Women was the answer to that need.

*Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. By Betty Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin, NY University Press.

**http://fashionista.com/2013/08/macys-under-fire-for-blocking-womens-equal-pay-act-in-texas/

Joy of Resistance: Multicultural Feminist Radio @ WBAI airs on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of the month, at 9-10 PM. We cover the ongoing worldwide struggle of women for full equality and human rights. You can follow us at twitter.com/joyofresistance and follow/read our blog at joyofresistance.wordpress.com . Programs stream live @ wbai.org where they are also archived for 90 days.

WBAI NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT!!!

WBAI @ 99.5 FM broadcasts to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and is part of the Pacifica Radio Network, one of the few alternatives to the corporate-controlled media that dominate the airwaves–the station has been facing extremely hard times since Hurricane Sandy and needs your financial support at this time to continue broadcasting. We cannot afford to lose this legendary 53-year old non-commercial progressive radio station! Please consider going to http://www.wbai.org and contributing whatever amount you can to help keep alternative radio alive. If you join as a “WBAI Buddy” at $10. or more a month (the WBAI “Buddy Program”), you can help sustain the station permanently (and be entitled to a range of gifts). Joining the WBAI “Buddy Program” in the name of Joy of Resistance will also be a vote for feminist radio at WBAI.Thank you for your support!.

Wednesday, April 30, 9-10 pm: Stephanie Coontz, author of “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960’s”

Joy of Resistance is heard on the 1st & 3rd Wednesday of the month @WBAI, 99.5 fm in NYC (& the tri-state area) & streams at wbai.org. Follow JOR @ twitter.com/joyofresistance

A re-airing of our classic feminist conversation between Stephanie Coontz, author of “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960’s”  and Fran Luck (Joy of Resistance’ Executive Producer).

The discussion will center on how  Betty Friedan‘s watershed book “The Feminine Mystique” (1963) changed the conceptual landscape for American women–and will focus on the social conditions that prevailed for women in the 1940’s ’50’s & early 60’s), when “Help Wanted: Female” ads, “Head and Master” laws (which gave men legal control of marriage) and a Freudianism that diagnosed ambition in women as a neurosis –combined to proscribe women’s lives.

We’ll examine how the feminist history of the 1920’s was erased and images of earlier feminists were distorted so that women of the 1950’s were denied their feminist history–just as the backlash against the feminists of the 1960’s going on today is denying today’s generation if young women their real history. We’ll look at how women were pushed out of the good jobs they held in the 1940’s (which they were able to get because men were fighting World War ll), sold a bill of goods that the only path to “true womanhood” was through becoming stay-at-home wives and mothers–and how these images of American womanhood were then used as part of the “Cold War.”

We’ll look at how feminist periods run in “cycles”, with each feminist upsurge, followed by a period in which a “crisis in masculinity,” is declared–supposedly caused by “women going too far”--followed by attempts to take away gains of women achieved during the previous feminist period.

The show will be accompanied by period music from the 1950’s, including “Sincerely,” sung by The MacGuire Sisters; “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?” sung by Patti Paige; “Mr. Sandman,” sung by The Chordettes and the “I Love Lucy” themesong, sung by Desi Arnaz.

Joy of Resistance: Multicultural Feminist Radio @ WBAI airs on the 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month, at 9-10 PM. We cover the “ongoing worldwide struggle of women for full liberation, equality and human rights.” You can tweet us at twitter.com/joyofresistance and follow/read our blog at joyofresistance.wordpress.com and also communicate with us through the “comments” section on our blog. Programs stream live @ wbai.org where they are archived there for 90 days.

WBAI @ 99.5 FM broadcasts to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and is part of the Pacifica Radio Network, one of the few alternatives to the corporate-controlled media that dominate the airwaves–and it needs your financial support to continue broadcasting!

Please consider going to www.wbai.org and contributing whatever amount you can to help keep alternative radio alive. If you join as a “WBAI Buddy” you can help sustain the station permanently for as little as $10. a month (automatically taken out of your bank account/credit card) and be entitled to a range of gifts. Go to Give2WBAI.org to become a WBAI Buddy or find out other ways you can support the station. If you join as a “Buddy” in the name of Joy of Resistance your contribution will be counted as a “listener vote” for continued and expanded feminist programming at WBAI.

Thank you for your support!